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The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser

Posted by kdawson on from the something-in-the-water dept.

waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."

27 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Correction. by jcr · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first web browser of all was WorldWideWeb.app, and it was a NeXTSTEP program. It was graphical from the beginning.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:Correction. by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Informative
      This page seems to supply the key point that's missing from the linked article:

      Erwise was a popular web browser in the early days of the World Wide Web. At the time of its release in April 1992, one month prior to ViolaWWW, it was the world's first web browser with a graphical user interface for non-NeXT computers.

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    2. Re:Correction. by lastchance_000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So, you're saying that it was the first browser, except for the first one. Got it.

    3. Re:Correction. by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Informative

      WorldWideWeb.app was the first written for NeXt (and first one, period). Erwise was was the first one written for Unix. And Cello (or Mosaic?) was the first one written for Windows. You can try and parse it all you like, but you'll still have to give an American at least some of the credit. Sorry to spoil the pissing contest.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    4. Re:Correction. by commodore64_love · · Score: 2

      >>>Since you refer to modem speeds as "1k or 2k" then I suspect you weren't really part of that era.

      Dear AC: It's called rounding. I chose to round to 1k and 2k instead of saying 1.2k and 2.4k to keep my post easy to understand for readers. Clear? Good. Also if you still have doubts I was part of the era, look at my name. (Hint- Commodore=64 was an 80s computer which used 300, 1200, and 2400 baud modems. Yes I was there.)

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    5. Re:Correction. by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Informative

      P.S.

      >>>14.4K, maybe 28.8K... I forget. Went to cable around then and never looked back

      Lucky dude. I was using dialup modems right up to 2007, when they finally installed DSL for $15 a month. I could have gone with cable as early as 1997, but the $120 cost was outrageous. Even now I think $50 a month is too high, and I wish Comcast would offer a lower price tier.

      If anybody cares (and they probably don't) the official V. standards are:

      300 bit/s 300 baud
      1200 bit/s 600 baud
      2400 bit/s 600 baud or 1200 baud
      4800 bit/s 1200 baud
      9600 bit/s 2400 baud

      14400 bit/s 2400 baud
      28800 bit/s 3200 baud
      33600 bit/s 3429 baud
      56000 bit/s (digital) 8000 baud

      With compression most of those modems could get more than 3 times their true speed (i.e. 56000 acted like 150,000+). I've owned all of those except the 300 and 4800 modems. I don't know anyone who had 4800. It's interesting how most of the speed increase came from, not increasing baud, but new modulation methods that could better tolerate the noise.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    6. Re:Correction. by IMightB · · Score: 2, Funny

      Get off my Lawn!

      I had to whistle into the phone in my day....

      Actually my first was a 300baud with accoustic coupler....

  2. ha ha by LurkingOnSlashdot · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you thought Erwise was the first graphical Web browser, think again.

  3. Re:?tsop tsrif by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ?täsoopiyauo tsauyriifäää

    I'm sorry, this is a story about Finns. Corrected that for you.

  4. Whoa! Andressen != MOSAIC by GPLDAN · · Score: 2, Informative

    Eric Bina wrote just as much code as Andressen. And Andressen later had help from several other UI students.

    Also, nobody thinks Mosaic was the first. If anything, the card these Finns trump is Tim Bruce, who wrote Cello.

    This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.

    1. Re:Whoa! Andressen != MOSAIC by deKernel · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is worse than Bill Gates inventing the personal computer, when all he did was steal CP/M. Let's do a little better at getting history correct.

      No offense, but Bill Gates did not steal CP/M. He had the smarts and vision to purchase a product called 86-DOS when other people thought that home computers would be nothing but toys.

      Now I say this as someone who is typically critical of shear number of flaws in Windows and the BILLIONS of dollars spent to develop that ship-wreck. You might not like his products, but you can't argue with his early business savvy.

  5. Opera Was First! by vjmurphy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Despite the company and browser not existing at the time, I can confidently say that Opera had all these features before Erwise. There will be naysayers, of course.

    --
    Vincent J. Murphy
    Spandex Justice
  6. Re:Nothing at CERN? by Korin43 · · Score: 2, Informative

    They used WorldWideWeb.app which is for NeXT.

  7. whatever... by The+Mayor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Erwise until today. A have a few questions about Erwise:
    - Did it support graphics other that XBM?
    - Did it render HTML, or some other markup language?

    I did some consulting for a company called HyperMedia Corporation in 1991-92. As part of that work, I watched closely the development of HTML, NCSA Mosaic, and the lot. HMC's markup language was proprietary and binary. The first thing that struck me about HTML was the ease of editing--you didn't need a dedicated editor. Then, I remember seeing early builds of NCSA's browser (to become Mosaic) when they first added, IIRC, gif support. I remember being absolutely floored with the ability to create attractive content in only a few minutes. My first thought after seeing it was, "I need to find a new job!" Sure enough, within a few months HMC was out of business.

    The end result is that there were many factors that led to the success of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape. First, Mosaic ran on platforms other than the X Window System, so it was more accessible. Second, it was among the first to support usable graphics (i.e. not XBM), at least on an accessible platform (Emacs' browser & WorldWideWeb.app had early image support, too, but both were on platforms that had very narrow distribution possibilities). Third, it used standard HTML.

    Erwise might have had all of these, with the one caveat that it supported only Unix/X Window System. Hard to say from this article. However, I think it's a little simplistic to say that funding was the only thing holding these guys back from Netscape-like success.

    --
    --Be human.
  8. Real men use gopher... by Ritz_Just_Ritz · · Score: 2, Funny

    Harumph!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

    8-)

    1. Re:Real men use gopher... by jd · · Score: 2, Funny

      And WAIS. Real Men use Gopher and WAIS. And Archie. Real Men use Gopher and WAIS and Archie. And the Spanish Inquisition.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  9. So... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who are they suing?

  10. Re:Hypercard by Calsar · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because it wasn't. The first hypertext system was the Hypertext Editing System created in 1967. The first graphical browser with point and click interface was the NLS system which was part of the Augment project created in 1968 by Doug Engelbart. There weren't any point and click inteface before then because he also created the mouse as part of that project.

  11. Depends on what you mean by "Graphical" by ThrowAwaySociety · · Score: 3, Interesting

    WorldWideWeb 1.0 had a windowed, point-and-click UI, so it would be "graphical" compared to, say, Lynx.

    The real title of "first graphical browser" goes to whichever application first displayed inline graphics on a page. I'm not sure exactly which one this was...NCSA Mosaic often gets credit for this, but the feature was also added to later versions of ViolaWWW and WorldWideWeb.

    Inline graphics were a major factor in the success of the Web over existing internet hypertext systems like Gopher.

  12. Re:When an American is credited with an invention by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    What bugs me to some extent on this note, even though you were modded down (Which a good 50% of the time here is a pack of pricks just causing trouble)?

    Is that folks from other nations may "hate on us", but, they fail to realize something: THIS NATION IS COMPOSED OF THEIR NATIONALS WHO MIGRATED HERE, thus, i.e.? We ARE they also.

    Now - I can understand disliking the U.S.A. in some of its governmental policies (especially the BUSH administration, thank God they are gone now), but, not its people as a whole.

    I've been called all kinds of racial slurs in my time, because of my bloodline, & realize it's crap: There are GOOD people of all types, and BAD people of all types, & good & bad? Just points of view.

    APK

  13. The Slashdot story is misleading... by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Thank you for saying that. The Slashdot story is misleading, as often happens. The story says "... a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic...". But there were huge discussions of Hypertext long before that. It was clear that Hypertext would be implemented anywhere it could be used. What those who wrote the first internet browsers did was implement an old idea for the internet.

    Flashterm makes me laugh.

  14. Re:Ideas worth a cent a docen. by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.

    Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.

    Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.

  15. Re:Mosaic -- Netscape? by Stormwatch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm pretty sure NCSA's Mosaic "evolved" into "Internet Explorer".

    Not really, at least not directly. Check this:

    Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million. The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  16. Re:Hypercard by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hypercard has got to be one of the first ever implementations of the "hypertext" concept, though.

    Not even close. HyperCard was originally released with System Software 6 in 1987. Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a working hypertext system almost twenty years earlier, in 1968.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  17. Info files and man pages by flyingfsck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The venerable Unix info files and even man pages also do the same thing. Web browsers was a logical improvement of existing ideas. It was not evolutionary, not revolutionary.

    --
    Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
  18. Prior art to rip down current copywrong by n0tWorthy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can any of this prior art be used to tear apart the existing thousands of software copyrights that have been issued to MS, Sun, IBM, ...? It may not have been commercialized or even copyrighted but if it existed before the Copyright trolls got to it then maybe some of this mess can be undone.

    --
    "Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
  19. WWW might have begun a year earlier? by nurb432 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or if they tried to profit off it, might have never happened at all.

    The openness of the early days is why we have it today.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----